


John: Come Back To Earth (C)

by TTMIYH



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Angst with a Happy Ending, Depression, F/F, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, John's in a bad place and he's gonna get better but its gonna be slow and painful: the fic, M/M, Recovery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-01-13 16:43:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18472969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TTMIYH/pseuds/TTMIYH
Summary: John wasn't really willing to get up off from the couch.Sure, theoretically, he may have been able to lift his legs up and put them on the ground, and stand up and crack his aching back, and stretch his arms out over his head until he was nice and relaxed and go take a quick jog, but he didn't have the energy for it. He hadn't had the energy for it in an entire year, and he hadn't had the energy for it even if it were to get up and get food for his nineteenth birthday, spent by himself. He thinks that his phone was lit up with snapchat notifications, but he never bothered checking. Even his most hellacious of streaks up and died a couple of months ago.John turned nineteen yesterday and he forgot until now, a day later.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by an RP I'm in.
> 
> I know the Epilogue effectively invalidates everything in this but that's not going to stop me. If anything it made me want to write this story more, one that's been percolating in my head for a couple of years. So, consider it non-canon, just as Rose says.
> 
> Content warning: Depression symptoms such as undereating, oversleeping, anhedonia, etc. I am not going to be offering a filtered view of depression here. This is as real and as raw as I can put into words.
> 
> Second content warning: There will be porn, because I want to. If you don't like it, chapters with pornographic content will be delineated by a note at the beginning so that you can skip them. I will try to keep the plot advancement and the porn separated as much as possible but I make no guarantees.

John wasn't really willing to get up off from the couch.

Sure, theoretically, he may have been able to lift his legs up and put them on the ground, and stand up and crack his aching back, and stretch his arms out over his head until he was nice and relaxed and go take a quick jog, but he didn't have the energy for it. He hadn't had the energy for it in an entire year, and he hadn't had the energy for it even if it were to get up and get food for his nineteenth birthday, spent by himself. He thinks that his phone was lit up with snapchat notifications, but he never bothered checking. Even his most hellacious of streaks up and died a couple of months ago.

John turned nineteen yesterday and he forgot until now, a day later, the sun drifting around its position to cast him in a dim red glow through the few windows. On the television, a Salamander Puppet Show played, their best recreation of how actual television was. It was surprisingly good, and John just wasn't saying that because he didn't have anything better to watch - Jade had hooked up wireless cable last year, so he could theoretically be watching anything.

An orange lay half-eaten by the table next to the couch, along with a small gift basket full of fruit. There were gift baskets everywhere, mostly arranged in a loose pile near the kitchen, most of them empty. Casey, bless her heart, had been showing up week after week, blubbing something to him, and then leaving him a little basket of food. Occasionally, she would bring a skeleton or two, or one of her salamander friends, and they would drag the discarded baskets into the pile, and maybe kick some of John's clothes into another, smaller pile, smaller only by virtue of clothes being more compressible.

John was sad.

He knew it was selfish of him to want Dad Crocker to come visit and clean up after him, like he was still a thirteen-year-old who couldn't take care of himself. No, John was a nineteen-year-old who couldn't take care of himself, but Dad had his own life to lead. Even if he looked like John's Dad and acted like John's Dad, he couldn't just uproot him to the Salamander Village, or something silly like that. Staying in a crazy video game for 3 years kind of messed with his priorities. Learning how to clean up after himself came on the Battleship, and it was a lesson barely taken to, considering the nature of his company. Only Davesprite was really the one who got on everyone's ass about cleanliness, and even then, he spent more times napping in the shirt pile than anyone else. With three teenagers around, cleaning was at its barest minimum.

He should probably pick up after himself, he thought, yawning. Most of his day was occupied by sleep, now, generally about 16 hours of it. The waking world was starting to fray at the edges, now that he could dream like a normal person could - memories blending with each other into coalesced morasses, the barriers between the waking world and the dreaming one sometimes blurring. Sometimes, when he did get up and walk (or float), he started losing time, things that he thought were memories turning out to be dreams, things that he thought were dreams turning out to be memories, and constructs of both categories slipping from between his fingers like sand at the beach. He hadn't been to the beach in a while.

He hadn't been in his kitchen for a while, either. The gift baskets usually had enough, and he hadn't really gone grocery shopping in a while thanks to Casey's support, but oftentimes he felt like a burden on them. Like one day when the salamanders came to visit, he should lock the door on them and not let them in and tell them to eat their oranges and bananas and their sugar cookies and cherry tomatoes and the occasional pack of gushers that one of them went into the city for since they knew John liked them. He should tell them, no, stop helping me. I'll be fine. I don't want your charity.

But that would require getting up and locking the door. Or telling them to go away. 

John hadn't raised his voice in a while. He barely spoke.

Who could he possibly speak to?

When there was a knock at the front door, he almost - almost! - jumped up in surprise, the kind of startle that normally would've launched his thin, woven blanket sky high to flutter down comedically on his face. But now it just made his heart skip a beat. Casey never really knocked - she knew to just kick out the doorstop and wiggle her way in, because his doors were never shut except when it started to get muggy and mosquito-y outside, and even when they were, that was when she had a friend to help her with the doorknob. So, the fact that someone knocked meant that it was someone new. A light but thick knock, the kind of knock coming from someone you wouldn't expect it from. 

John wasn't sure who it could be, but he didn't say anything in response. He just let his eyebrows come back down to earth and he reclined his head into his pillow. The TV's light was the only thing illuminating him, since he hadn't hit a light switch in a while, and its shine leaked out of the windows and doors, and if someone peeked their head through, they could see John not looking back. They could see his skin and bones stretched out limp and tired over the couch's surface, a far cry from the stout, chubby, even muscular boy that had led them through the worst of Sburb's challenges.

Roxy pushed the door open and peeked her head inside, frowning.


	2. Chapter 2

It felt strange to know that even the peace they found on their new planet could still feel tenuous. They were all better off than they started--well, most of them were. Personally, Roxy had overcome the addiction and isolation of her childhood, and lots of her friends had gotten away from bad homes or habits throughout the years. All except one of her newest...friends? Were they even friends? When she first met John, she thought they clicked right away. He was funny, cute, and full of life. Now, it was almost like being friends with a ghost--a memory of a person. It'd been so long since she last had any meaningful contact with him via phone, much less in person.

For fuck's sake, it had been his birthday yesterday, and she barely got a response to her messages.

What did you even say to a ghost?

What do you say to someone who hurt you so profoundly with his absence when you knew they had to be hurting too? Or was Roxy just hoping he was hurting too? That seemed more selfish than anything. Ugh. This was pathetic. It was so pathetic, and yet, thinking about it was spurring her on all the more. Getting up the courage to knock took everything in the young Lalonde, and when she peeked in, she didn't exactly see John, although there was plenty of evidence that someone was there. She gently pushed open the unlocked door and put her head through. 

"John?" she asked the open air, resenting the way it cracked toward the end. Her face was put into a deep pout of worry, gently falling downwards as if the gravity of Earth C was pulling it away. A cursory scan of the house's interior returned nothing whatsoever. The stone-still figure on the couch just resembled a lump of blankets. John looked at Roxy and Roxy looked right past him and onwards to the rest of the room while she slowly made her way inside. "I know you're home. Can... can I come in?"

When there was no response, she walked in anyway.

John remembered Roxy. She was great - so vivacious and full of spirit and enthusiasm, like a Rose without the pretense, the layer of conversation-entrapping Nietzschean prose. He remembered Rose, too, and idly wondered how her marriage with Kanaya was going. Work in the brooding caverns must've been hard stuff! He really envied her work ethic.

Oh, right, Roxy.

John dreamt about Roxy a lot, or maybe he was remembering meeting her in that perfectly generic pyramid, or giving her the ring, a moment that felt so much more significant now but was just one in an ocean of dreams that he was drowning in, sticking to his skin and clothes like so much burning oil. It took a solid minute before his fantasies dispersed with the wind, and he snapped back to planet Earth. He heard her voice crack and it made him shudder. Did he hurt her? Was she here because she was angry at him? Honestly, he didn't remember if he sent her anything back yesterday, maybe he said something wrong?

He was definitely enmeshed in some kind of delirium at the moment. Even with Roxy directly in front of him, slowly stepping into his house, shutting the door behind her, he couldn't recognize her as the real thing, standing in front of him. He watched her politely shut the front door, and reach back to lock it, the latch closing with a click. He adjusted slightly in his blanket and watched as Roxy turned around to shut the door behind her, listening for the telltale click of a lock he hadn't engaged in years. It wasn't like Earth C had any crime with which locks were made to stop, and John stopped really caring about his privacy a while ago. He supposed that since Roxy had locked the door, a soft click filling the air, that she was looking for some privacy at the moment. She shut the door and turned back around to scope out the rest of John's house.

Roxy cringed slightly, anticipating seeing John on the other side of the door, only to have her expectations slightly interrupted by the simple fact that he wasn't. The door was unlocked, and she let herself in, and then started looking, remember? At the very least, that gave her a moment to try to process what she was even feeling. Was it relief or pain? Concern or anger? Love or heartbreak? All of them meshed together into one as she lightly padded into the house, shutting the door behind her. Within fifteen seconds, she finally caught a view of the nerd she was looking for, his ocean blues sticking out from underneath a mound of blankets big enough to hide him, the off-white-blue glow of the television doing nothing to help make him stand out.

She wordlessly made her way over, rounding the couch until she was standing in front of him. Before, their height difference was kind of cute, but with him sitting in his blanket cocoon and her standing with shoes on, it really made her feel like she was looming more than anything. It didn't quite feel like she was looking at John - more akin to staring at a spectre of the boy with the retcon powers, some kind of phantasm. She wasn't sure if that made this whole thing easier or harder.

John watched her from his position on the couch, under the blanket, watching her take a step in, and then a couple of more. He saw her look around for him, blinked, and he lost a couple of seconds, with Roxy managing to locate him in the meanwhile. It felt like it took an hour and it felt like it took no time at all, as she stood over him, his eyes looking up, and then sat down on the carpet, his eyes following her all the way back down to the ground.

Uncomfortable with the feeling of looming, she sat down in front of him.

The silence was an oppressive curtain between them, threatening them, like they were about to be smothered with it until neither one could breathe. Ironic enough. Roxy gingerly reached a hand out for John, grabbing for a limp hand and taking it into her own. Despite John's inaction, she decided to keep her hand on his. Him not pulling away was enough for her. She didn't expect him to reciprocate, really--especially not now.

When she reached for his hand, he didn't do anything dramatic like stick it out for her to hold onto like a liferaft, or yank it away to deny her the pleasure of holding it for some kind of catharsis, or slap it around and yell "I don't need your pity!" in the way people did in all the romantic comedies he had watched. He thought about all three options, and then just let his hand sit there until it was gently held at.

Finally, she shattered the quiet.

"Hey... You didn't get back to me yesterday... or really anyone? Radio silent. So um. Hi. You're... not lookin' too hot, dude. Normally you're packing a lot more heat than this. Did Jane send over the cake like she said she would? Dunno if one of the scaly dudes got it over or nah, but I think she baked something? She's been busy..." she rambled on until it all trailed off into quiet, shedding decibels like scales or feathers until all was left was a plucked chicken. Behold, a man (or a woman, in this case).

A cake sat in the freezer, with the fridge arranged as one of those "fridge on top freezer on bottom" arrangements. It was useful for the Salamanders. John could've sworn the new fridge was a gift from Dad, but he couldn't remember when he got it. "I think she did," John replied, hoarsely. His voice had deepened considerably since the sixteen-year old that ended the game forever ago, down what felt like two octaves, some kind of basso profundo that barely matched the frame it was coming out of. "And I think Casey probably put it in the fridge." He continued, looking down at Roxy's hand, his own palm just... Laying there, for her fingers to be held on top of. 

"I'm doing as well as I can, I think." He murmured quietly.

**Author's Note:**

> All comments, kudos, bookmarks, and views are seen, noted, and greatly appreciated. Thank you for reading.
> 
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